Iran has forced the US into one of the biggest strategic defeats in its short, violent and bloody history.
The memorandum of understanding with Iran, signed (symbolically or not), at Versailles yesterday, signalled, as I wrote earlier this week, that we’re witnessing the collapse of American hard power.
After it was signed, Trump made some extraordinary comments that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the handbook of anti-imperial critique, including that it’s not fair to tell Iran it can’t have missiles if all it’s neighbours have them and that it’s “common sense” that the country should be able to enrich uranium for energy. Trump also admitted oil reserves were running out and the world was approaching a depression, which slays the idea (an idea I never bought), that the US attack was a genius move to control the world’s oil and gas.
Iran has suffered some serious damage to its infrastructure as well as burying over 3,000 civilians, but it has checkmated the US strategically. And Trump has had to accept that. Iran’s ability to hit key regional infrastructure from deeply-buried missile cities, along with its ability to control the Strait, won the day. The US also appears to be reluctantly accepting some other realities. A few hours after the MoU was signed, after it was put to him that Israel wasn’t happy with the tentative deal, JD Vance said that Israel “is a country of nine million people that can’t just kill its way out of every national security problem.”
They read the polls, they see the way the wind is blowing, and they’re moving with it.
Israel of course is still a vital strategic outpost for empire, and it will not be abandoned yet. But there is absolutely a future in which the value of Israel to empire becomes less useful than the economic value empire can gain from a wider peace in the region, even if that peace runs counter to Israeli interests. And if Israel, not Iran or the resistance, comes to be seen as the main obstacle to this future, a position Trump and Vance appear to be moving towards, it is entirely conceivable that Israel, just like South Africa, will be globally ostracised and abandoned.
If this were to happen, the range of outcomes is extremely broad. Tensions between orthodox and secular Jews are already high in Israel, and you could reasonably argue that under conditions of global abandonment, civil war would break out. Before or after such a war, you might get a government run by Ben-Gvir and Jewish end-times fanatics who decide to fight the world and trigger a nuclear holocaust. Or the fanatics might lose, and you get a government which enters into international negotiations towards one state with equal rights for all. A former prime minister of Israel has, after all, just labelled Israeli actions in the West Bank ethnic cleansing.
I think we’re a long way from Israel ever giving up its colonial privileges. Civil war is a lot more likely than the negotiated end of the state, but we’re certainly a big step closer than we’ve ever been to whatever comes next for the genocidal colonial outpost.
Maybe this all seems too optimistic to you. And I hate to blow my own trumpet. But I was among the minority who predicted the start of the war before it started, who said Iran wouldn’t lose, that there’d be no regime change and no US victory via an air war was possible. When the ceasefire was announced I was among even fewer who said it would hold because the US was out of real options, while the consensus anti-imperial opinion said it was a ruse to buy time for a land invasion or other escalation.
And now, despite the calling off of talks in Geneva over the next stage of the process, my prediction, for what it’s worth, is that this won’t mean a return to war, and that in fact it will further the process of US-Israel estrangement, with Trump and Vance likely to see it as further confirmation that Israel, not Iran, is the impediment to peace.
Which is all to say, Trump was a necessary evil.
Of course we’ll never know if a Democrat as president would have launched an attack on Iran, but it would have come eventually. And given that an attack on Iran was inevitable, it was the best case scenario that it happened under Trump, an ideologically drifting narcissist without any real loyalties or attachments. A man motivated to protect his own personal financial interests above anything else (a number of which sit within the range of Iranian missiles). A man who was always going to be outmanoeuvred by a country led, literally, by men and women with PhDs, by philosophers, mystics and engineers. There were reports that in the process of negotiations, Iran drafted in the country’s top psychologists to craft messages to appeal to Trump’s ego and vainglorious personality. It appears to have worked.
From only ever acting retaliatorily, from closing the Strait of Hormuz to striking American bases and the oil and gas infrastructure of US proxies, to employing psychologists to sweet talk a narcissist, Iran bossed the process from day one.
And Israel knows it.
It’s attacks on Lebanon are a final attempt to derail the process and regain some leverage over the negotiations. I don’t think it’ll work. We’re too far down the track. The Strait opens, the oil and gas starts flowing, or, with oil reserves at critical levels, we’re looking at a global depression. And Trump now appears motivated to avoid that, not least to protect his own wealth, above and beyond the objections of Israel. I don’t believe, as many still do, that the MoU, Trump’s comments and Vance’s criticisms of Israel, are all part of some drawn out psy-op before another attack on Iran.
This isn’t to give Trump any credit. It’s just to say empire isn’t omnipotent or strategically untouchable. You can, with the right war strategy, alongside favourable geography and propitious timing, force it to make concessions it doesn’t want to make.
Trump was necessary. Necessary to strip away the niceties and reveal the true face of empire, to reveal its naked impunity, to showcase the war crimes in all their immoral bloodlust. Yes, from Vietnam to Iraq to the so-called War on Terror, what Trump has shown us is nothing new, but through careful stage-management and competent administration, the myth of benign American empire has managed to endure. I’m not sure that myth will survive Trump. He’s also been necessary to reveal the limits of empire, to show it can be beaten, to expose its vulnerabilities, to detail its weaknesses.
Iran should have tied Gaza more closely to the MoU, as it has with Lebanon, but it has delivered a valuable blueprint in how to fight empire.
Trump has also been necessary to expose the plastic progressives, the liberal anti-Trump imperialists who, in their opposition to Trump’s deal with Iran, can only look like warmongering imperial psychopaths. From all those sharing memes on social media about surrender, from the Democrats and CNN talking heads decrying the deal, to Jimmy Fallon dragging Trump for giving Iran back the money the US stole, there is no articulation of an alternative to endlessly bombing Iran. There’s no anger from liberals over dead Iranians, or at the imperial state, at Zionism or the embedded death machinery that made this violence possible. No, they’re just embarrassed for empire. And they don’t want to recognise the limits of that empire.
With Israel still bombing Lebanon and oil reserves at critical thresholds, however, this is all far from over.
Iran has sketched out two futures for the US and it now has a decision to make: stand behind the deal which Trump has loudly proclaimed as necessary to save the world, and force Israel to stand down, or let Israel dictate the process, return to war and drag the world into an economic depression. Anything is still possible, of course, but I judge the latter extremely unlikely.
And Trump, in his egotism, venality and conceited self-interest, might just be the man for the moment.
What I do know is that those Iranian psychologists have some more work to do.
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